Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business, publishes more than 2,500 journals and over 5,000 new books each year, offering a range of commercial services, including accelerated publishing, supplements, sponsored focus and reprints. The company recently acquired Dove Medical Press, which specialises in the publication of open access journals across the broad spectrum of science, technology and especially medicine.

This talk aims to de-mystify the process of manuscript submission to medical journals. From a publisher’s perspective, it covers considerations prior to submission, pre-submission inquiries, the stages your manuscript undergoes after submission, and how to improve your chances of manuscript acceptance.

Prior to submission, it is important to check the journal’s author guidelines and aims and scope. The manuscript should be on scope for the journal, have a clear objective explaining what it adds to the literature, and include all requested sections and funding information.

At peer review, the most common criticisms we receive for industry-funded papers are that they have a marketing tone, so it is important to be careful of the language used, letting data speak for itself. Other common criticisms include missing references, flawed statistical analysis, lack of transparency or results being over or under-emphasised, and missing p-values in support of claims of significance.

To speed up the decision and avoid rejection post-peer review, make sure to provide clear, point-by-point responses to all reviewers’ comments, or rationale where you feel no change is needed. Adding new data, long delays during revision, unclear responses and unaddressed comments can all delay the editorial decision.

[For the avoidance of doubt: this video is intended to be freely accessible to all. Please feel free to share and use however you like. Cheers Peter Llewellyn, Director NetworkPharma Ltd and Founder of the MedComms Networking Community activity at http://www.medcommsnetworking.com]

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